Minification (programming) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Minification (very often just minify, and sometimes also minimisation or minimization), in computer programming languages and especially JavaScript, is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality. These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments and sometimes block delimiters; which are used to add readability to the code, but are not required for it to execute.

Minified source code is especially useful for interpreted languages deployed and transmitted on the Internet (such as JavaScript), because it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Minified source code may also be used as a kind of obfuscation. In Perl culture, aiming at extremely minified source code is the purpose of Perl golf game.

Minified source code is also very useful for HTML code. All white space in HTML is reduced to only one space on the surface of a web page, so it’s often quite possible to halve the size of a web page, by removing all excessive white space.